Friday, February 29, 2008

William F. Buckley, RIP

I've been terribly busy, so I had no chance until now to remark on the passing of William F. Buckley, my favorite conservative (and everyone else's, too, I guess.) As a longtime newspaper reporter, I was delighted by the title of Mr. Buckley's latest book, CANCEL YOUR OWN GODDAM SUBSCRIPTION. My wife, the librarian, who apparently doesn't take very many angry calls from readers, could not make out why the title amused me so much.

Reason's Hit and Run blog posts many interesting notices on Buckley, including this interview with the magazine. Interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" is here.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

From Sandusky to the starsOne of the fringe benefits of working for the Sandusky Register is that I get to cover NASA Plum Brook Station, a nearby NASA facility that tests spacecraft. Here I offer two views of the Space Power Facility. Inside, workers are installing a noise and vibration testing equipment that will be used to test spacecraft for Project Constellation, NASA's project to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars. The dome is above the SPF's world's largest thermal vacuum chamber, which replicates the cold and airlessness of space and was used to make sure the Mars rovers would land safely.

I'm at the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University, covering the Obama-Clinton debate for my newspaper, the Sandusky Register.

Biggest initial surprise: I heard demonstrators, so I walked over to hear who was making the most noise -- Obama followers or Clinton folk. The answer was neither -- it turned out almost all of the noise was coming from Serbian nationalists protesting the Bush administration's decision to recognize Kosovo as an independent country.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

My birthday dinner

This weekend was my birthday, so my wife took me out to dinner to one of my favorite Chinese restaurants, Bo Loong, which is a little bit east of downtown Cleveland, near the Chinat0wn area. It's the kind of place where you often see Chinese people dining and which has items on the menu which you'd never see in an Americanized Chinese restaurant.I took a couple of photographs at the place, one of which shows Ann at our table. I had the salt baked shrimp, which come in their shells, with two little black eyes like beads on one end. When my wife tried the dish at an earlier visit, she carefully decapitated each shrimp, and the waiter admonished her she was supposed to eat the whole thing. I took his advice and discovered that biting off the head was delicious.

We each had an entree and we each ordered soup. The waiter first brought my entree, then brought our soup, then brought our rice, then finally brought Ann's entree. He seemed puzzled when we pointed out he didn't bring us the soup first. I have no idea if this was bad service or the way genuinely authentic Chinese restaurants do things.